Matthew MurrayGigabyte A75-UD4HIts blue-and-white coloration may not make it appear very adult, but Gigabyte's A75-UD4H motherboard is well primed as the foundation for a PC using AMD?s new FM1 socket.

Lots of motherboard headers, including for USB 3.0. Good expansion slot configuration. Full range of Gigabyte features.

Cons

Does not support full graphical UEFI. Garish color scheme. Slightly more expensive than competing motherboards.

Bottom Line

Its blue-and-white coloration may not make it appear very adult, but Gigabyte's A75-UD4H motherboard is well primed as the foundation for a PC using AMD?s new FM1 socket.

We hoped, when we looked at Gigabyte's line of all-black Intel Sandy Bridge motherboards (such as the Gigabyte P67A-UD4-B3), that its new, starker design aesthetic would immediately appear in all the other company's motherboards as well. No such luck! The Gigabyte A75-UDH4 ($129.99 street), an ATX motherboard loaded with the new FM1 socket and intended for use with AMD's A-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), is a return to the color-blinding cornucopia of blue and white that has long distinguished Gigabyte's boards. But if your case doesn't have a windowed side panel, the A75-UDH4 is a fine way to jump on board the Llano train as it chugs down the tracks of revolutionizing integrated graphics on the PC.

For the visual capabilities of AMD's latest hardware on its "Lynx" platform (what you get when you combine a Llano motherboard and an A-Series APU) remain the most compelling reason to go in this direction. With support for DirectX 11 (DX11) and delivering beefy frame rates (well, for built-in solutions, anyway), Llano is definitely the way to go if you don't think you'd get quite enough use out of a discrete video card to justify the more significant cash outlay. Because, as of this writing, you can pair a motherboard and the most powerful A-Series APU, the A8-3850 for under $250, that's not insignificant. And with four video output ports (VGA, dual-link DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort) on the A75-UD4H, you have every reasonable option at your disposal for viewing the video Lynx can generate.

What else comes on the A75-UD4H? On the rear panel, four USB 3.0 ports, along with two USB 2.0 ports, a combo eSATA/USB 2.0 port, and one FireWire jack, to start with; in addition, there's a single PS/2 port and Gigabit Ethernet jack, and audio outputs for both 7.1-channel (using the Realtek ALC889 chipset) and S/PDIF. There are four more headers for USB 2.0 ports, two more for USB 3.0 ports, just in case you don't have quite enough of those yet. You'll also find five SATA jacks, all of which support the newer 6Gbps SATA III standardan excellent trend we hope to see continue and expand in the month ahead.

The collection of expansion slots comprises three PCI Express (PCIe) x1 slots, two regular PCI slots, and two PCIe x16 slots so you can configure CrossFireX to unite the power of two discrete video cardsthough the second is only wired at x8, so you won't get equal speed across both in that case. The CMOS battery is nestled between the two PCIe x16 slots, which may be inconvenient if you plan on installing a lot of cards. There are four RAM bays, which support up to 32GB of dual-channel DDR3 DIMMs running at as much as 1,866MHz.

Per its usual, Gigabyte has provided on the A75-UDH4 its standard wealth of features you may not think about on an everyday basis, but that are nonetheless nice to have. These include things like a heavy-duty two-ounce copper PCB design and solid capacitors the company claims are good for up to 50,000 hours; USB tweaks, such as giving each a dedicated fuse so you don't take several down at once if there's a catastrophe, and sending more power through them to charge your devices more quickly; and the use of a high-end audio codec Gigabyte claims can provide lossless audio when watching Blu-ray movies.

One thing Gigabyte has still not gotten around to including on its motherboards, however, is a fully graphical UEFIit still uses its "combo" version, called "DualBIOS," which combines the user-unfriendliness of a traditional text-only BIOS with the behind-the-screens benefits of the newer technology (such as being able to use without issue hard drives larger than 2.19TB in capacity). The A75-UD4H includes Gigabyte's standard suite of Windows-based tweaking and overclocking software utilities, but the company is now one of the last remaining not to have implemented the mouse-supporting UEFI on its products.

In our performance testing with an A8-3850 APU, the A75-UD4H kept solid pace with one of its competitors, the ASRock A75 Pro4. In fact, there was no statistically significant variation between their results: Gigabyte barely lost on PCMark 7 (2,431 versus 2,463), Handbrake video conversion (2 minutes 11 seconds versus 2 minutes 10 seconds), and the TrueCrypt encryption benchmark (103MBps versus 105MBps), but won by equally minuscule margins in most other tests. If you're putting together a Lynx system, either motherboard will suffice from a performance standpoint.

But of the two, the Gigabyte A75-UD4H is unquestionably more forward-thinking overall than the ASRock A75 Pro4. Though seeing a full UEFI would be nice, Gigabyte's hybrid incarnation at least gives you its major technical functionalityand the USB 3.0 headers and faster secondary PCIe x16 slots ideal for improving your expansion options both now and in the future. Gigabyte's board may run you about $20 more than ASRock's, but we think what you get is worth sacrificing one additional portrait of Andrew Jackson.

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About the Author

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been... See Full Bio

Gigabyte A75-UD4H

Gigabyte A75-UD4H

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